So I've added my new hard drive.
used fdisk to partition it, and used mkfs to format it.
It's mounted and the /etc/fstab has had the line added for auto mounting.
It appears when I do:
df -h
How do I get access to all my new space? My home directory is only showing the space that's left on my original drive, and I am unable to copy files over to my computer. Am I missing something? I didn't think it was like windows where you have separate root directories for the hard drives. Meaning that when I run out of space on one drive, Linux automatically starts using the space on the other drive. I thought this was transparent to the user, and logically it appears as if it's a single drive.

Debian Linux
IDE drives.
ext3 formats

Where should I be looking and is there something additional I need to do?

_________________Islam is a faith where you can't eat your meat. Christianity is a faith where you can't beat your meat.

While the filesystem logically appears as a single "drive", the location of the physical space created by adding the new disk depends on where the newly created filesystem is mounted. For example, suppose my system consists of a single IDE drive. If I install a second IDE disk to my system, and create a single partition and filesystem on it, and then mount that filesystem on /mnt/mybigharddisk, then the new space resides on /mnt/mybigharddisk. You would see something like this if you typed "mount" with no options:

/dev/hdb1 on /mnt/mybigharddisk type ext3 (rw)

If you really want the new space to be accessible under your home directory, then create a directory under your home directory and use that directory as your mount point, for example...

I would remove all partitions and run the Linux setup from the CD. I can't explain it but I have had trouble installing Linux on a partition created using Microsoft's fdisk.

If you can find some other partitioning tools, look on sourceforge.net or somewhere to see if maybe there's a free one that claims Linux compatibility.

But I'm willing to bet your distro will recognize the unpartitioned fixed disk drive and partition it for you. Besides you should let the installer create a page file/swap file partition for you it makes Linux perform better.

keen, I did all the partitioning of it from within my debian distro. My problem was that it wasn't "automatically" included in my overall space without a direct link (sym link actually) to it. I was under the impression that in Linux, there is an overall freespace that is an accumulation of all the hard drives. When one is full, the system starts using the next one. This didn't happen, so I was confused. I am curious though how it would have worked if the drive had been there all along......Guess I"ll find out when I blow this up.

_________________Islam is a faith where you can't eat your meat. Christianity is a faith where you can't beat your meat.

It wouldn't have mattered even if the disk was there from the very start. You would have just had an extra disk on which you could have allocated your partitions. Using old-style partitions, you still would not have been allowed to create a filesystem that spans both disks, unless you're using a RAID. But since we're talking about 2 disks here and you want to maximize your storage, you'd be left with RAID 0, so that wouldn't really be recommended (unless you don't mind losing your data whenever you jar a drive cable loose due to an errant sneeze, fart, etc). So that basically brings us back to LVÂ´s.

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